26 Jun

2017

I'm delighted to have been appointed as one of the new Community Ambassadors for Homeless and Rootless at Christmas (HARC). The charity was founded in Sheffield in 1989. HARC provides a safe haven for vulnerable men and women during the days over the Christmas period when other services are closed. It provides three hot meals a day as well as a host of other services such as health care advice, clothing and laundry.

HARC is run by volunteers and a part-time project manager. Last Christmas it was based at the Cathedral Archer project, where it was open for nine days over the festive period.

As a HARC Ambassadors, I will be helping to ‘tell the HARC story’ by maintaining relationships with regular donors in our local community such as schools, churches and community groups as well as reaching out to organisations that have not interacted with it before and want to know more about its work in Sheffield.

A key task of mine this year is to reach out to the business community in Sheffield and to help them engage with the project. If you company or organisation wants to know more about HARC, the reasons it exists in the UK's fourth largest city and what you can do to help, then please get in touch. I'll be happy to come along and give you and your team a short talk about HARC, the work we do and what it can mean to be homeless and lonely at a time when very many others are celebrating.

19 May

2017

Will whoever is advising Ched Evans, the professional footballer, jailed and then released from prison after being found guilty of raping a drunken 19-year-old girl, please stand up and explain what you hope to gain from using an interview with The Times to offer advice to girls on how to not get raped?

If someone is not guiding this man's PR then they should because he has just unilaterally reopened the massive and divisive argument about his actions and dragged his new and former employer, Sheffield United Football Club back into the full glare of a very negative public debate. The footballer was convicted of raping a 19-year-old woman back in 2011 and jailed for five years; last year he was cleared of the crime after a retrial.

The case split the nation and even more so, Sheffield United fans with sponsors departing the club and a massive petition being signed by thousands begging the club to no longer have anything to do with him. The club, at the time of his release, decided against signing him and he went on to play for Chesterfield FC. With the relegation of Chesterfield to the lowest division of the English Football League tat the end of this season, Evans sought a new club and has resigned for Sheffield United.

Why has he taken this opportunity to open old wounds that he and SUFC must know will only cause a negative and divisive response? Why has SUFC not stipulated to him that he must not talk about the case let alone put himself up as some sort of authority on how girls and women should act if they do not want to be raped?

If Ched Evans really believes that, as he told The Times, "a lot of work needs to be done in relation to consent because I definitely think that the police have an agenda to find ways to charge people and the easiest one is the drunk one,” then maybe he should spend his time talking to men about not getting drunk and being incapable of telling whether or not a girl is giving consent to having sex. If he wants to be seen as someone who wants to take repairable steps, accept his own responsibility for the damage he has done to that young girl, a girl who has had to change her identity five times and is currently raising funds to emigrate due to being vilely hounded by supporters of Ched Evans, then maybe he should be having conversations with them, telling them that their actions are unacceptable, that his case and their actions have prevented and will prevent more victims of what he sickly refers to as "real rapists" coming forward - and maybe he should have a conversation with himself about not trying to be his own victim.

Ched Evans is in no position to lecture girls and women on how to not get raped. He is, however, in a very good position to be able to tell the fathers, brother, sons, uncles and close male friends, those men most likely to rape a girl they know, that if you get drunk and cannot tell whether or not a girl is too drunk to give her consent to have sex, then it's best that you leave her alone - otherwise you may end up in court and spending more than two years in prison for a crime that no one will let you forget - especially if you keep talking about it in the press.

17 May

2017

On Friday 31st March 2017, Nivea, the skin-care brand that is owned by the Hamburg-based company Beiersdorf Global AG, launched a promotional campaign for its “invisible” deodorant aimed at customers in the Middle East.

It was intended to promote Nivea’s “Invisible for Black and White” deodorant with the advert depicting the back of a woman’s head with long, dark, wavy hair tumbling down the back of her all-white outfit, shot against a brightly lit window.

The company chose to launch the campaign via social media and put out the adverts on its Facebook page. With the Facebook campaign linked to the company’s Twitter page, the opportunity for the campaign to reach a wider public and for them to engage with it was enhanced. Unfortunately for Nivea, the response was not what they anticipated.

When the campaign went live, public furore was ignited by the strapline the company had attached to the image - below the woman’s flowing hair, in bold, blue capital letters ran the slogan: “WHITE IS PURITY.”

Within a very short time, Twitter was buzzing with negative comments connecting the strapline with racism.

“These glaring missteps are directly related to lack of internal inclusiveness,” said one PR professional’s Tweet.

Things took a turn for the worse when right-wing activists started praising the campaign on Nivea’s Facebook page and even adding images of Adolph Hitler appearing to endorse the product. This lead to even more negative Tweets and Facebook comments.

“Wow @NiveaUSA. This is horrendous. Your comments are FULL of society’s refuse. This cleared your marketing department? #prnightmare” read one Tweet.

Even worse was to follow, as white supremacist groups attached themselves to the campaign, claiming it supported their racist agendas as they set about posting on Twitter and Facebook.

This resulted in the Daily Mail publishing an image of a post by one of the groups on Nivea’s Facebook page, which read, “We enthusiastically support this new direction your company is taking. I’m glad we can all agree that #WhiteIsPurity.”

“Nivea has chosen our side and the most liked comments are glorious,” read one far-right Tweet, that carried a picture of Nivea’s Facebook post. Another far-right group went so far as to encourage its followers to “LIKE ALL (Nivea) COMMENTS, BUY THEIR PRODUCTS.”

The post on Facebook stayed live for the weekend until the PR storm reached the ears of the Nivea PR team and it was taken down, but by that time the team were in firefighting mode. Media requests for comment were ignored while the team devised a strategy to deal with the backlash.

Nivea set about responding to every Tweet in person, taking the position that everyone who had commented deserved personal contact. In doing so, it distanced itself from any of the Tweets or comments made by the far-right groups.

NiveaUK tweeted: @benjancewicz@plumandmustard@NIVEAUSAThis was not a @niveauk post, the NIVEA Middle East post was not meant to be offensive. We deeply apologise and it’s been removed.

NIVEA USA tweeted: @maej43@wickdchiq@niveaukThe NIVEA Middle East post was not meant to be offensive. We apologize. It’s been removed. NIVEA values diversity and tolerance.

The company then followed that up with a media statement apologising for the post, which it said had been removed after “concerns risen about ethnic discrimination.”

The media statement read as follows; “We are deeply sorry to anyone who may take offense to this specific post. After realizing that the post is misleading, it was immediately withdrawn. Diversity and equal opportunity are crucial values of NIVEA: The brand represents diversity, tolerance, and equal opportunity. We value difference. Direct or indirect discrimination must be ruled out in all decisions by, and in all areas of our activities.”

However, a connected advert for the same product with the strapline “Black Stays black. White Stays White.” was still live in the Nivea Middle East Facebook page two days after the offending one had been taken down.

So where did Nivea, a company that had been caught out with advertising deemed to be racially offensive in the past, go wrong? How did it not see the elephant in the room that was so glaringly obvious in hindsight?

The preparation of a PR campaign should take up as much, if not more time than the implementation of it. What’s more, it should look at every angle of possible interpretation by all audiences.

I have no idea who put this original advert together or who approved it for publication – but I will bet a pound to a penny that they overlooked the importance of semiotics and how images and language are interpreted by various readers. It would be easy to point the finger at one or two people in this campaign and blame them – but surely it was seen and approved by a large number of people who should have said, at some point, “hang on a minute, can this be interpreted in a different way?” Unless you look at your advert from as many different hilltops as possible, you are not in a position to anticipate the potential responses to it.

Equally important is getting comments from various people “before” the advert is approved for publication. If you are using an agency or in-house team to develop the advert, they have a responsibility to carry out the blue-sky thinking which identifies potential risks – but they are only human and can get carried away with their own ideas and not see the pitfalls; not that that is an excuse. As commissioners of the advert, the company it is promoting also has a responsibility to run PR health and safety checks on a planned advert. There is no absolute guarantee that an advert will not upset or offend someone, the options for interpretation and the multiplicity of varying opinions held by audiences precludes that – however, putting the right checks and balances in place before publication will prevent you making the same mistakes as Nivea did here.

21 Jan

2017

Over the years, a select few politicians have stood on platforms and declared their intention to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable; some with better intentions than others, but most with an aim of shaking up the system or status quo, to throw a cold bucket of water in society's face, to walk to the end of the gangplank and offer us all a very strong black coffee.

And so I find myself thinking the unthinkable about a man who clearly is willing to do the same - has Donald Trump dared to see the elephant in the room that everyone else is blind to - or to put it another way; is Trump's approach actually right?

For years the liberal left has bemoaned the state of politics, not just in the US and UK but worldwide. "It stinks, they are all in it for self-gain, they don't give a hoot about the common man and only use the middle-class as power pawns in the game" - we've all heard it, many of us have said it and complained from the comfort of our sofa's about the wretched "system."

Then along comes a man who promises not only to change things, he's going to tear up the rule books of politics, diplomacy and PR and replace them with no BS straight talk that the "common woman and man" can understand. He is going to address his public in the language that they use and recognise. He knows full well that he will lose some people and many others simply will not buy into his speeches and rhetoric at all - but that does not matter because this speaker, this marketeer has done his market research. He sees a huge gap in the market where no one is meeting it's demand.

For years the competition has played the game by its own rules and it worked; but what if they failed to see their market share dwindling in the face of demand for something else - just as Tesco, Sainsburys and Morrisons ignored what Aldi and Lidl saw?

What then if the new supplier comes along and sees these consumers and addresses them in a very attractive way that sees him suddenly gain market share and bottom-line growth? The competition is at a loss - how can this be? His promotional offer is all wrong, it's packaged with bad taste and runs counter to all the accepted marketing techniques; except it's not - it's actually classic in structure and delivery.

Trump has not so much turned politics on its head as applied basic business sense to his campaign. He is treating everything as he would a business - see the market opportunity, understand the language of customers and fill his keynote speeches with messages that resonate with the demand from that market - how could he fail? The rest of the market may be screaming blue murder at his approach but it can kick and scream all it likes, Trump will carry on addressing the market in his way so long as it responds to him; once it stops, he will change his message so that he retains its loyalty - we have already seen that with his reneging on campaign statements.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not blinded by his hollow rhetoric, like any good reality TV contestant, he will say anything to keep the man across the desk from pointing the finger and saying "you're fired" he knows how to play this game - let's face it, he invented a good part of it, he made up these media rules and knows how to use them to his advantage. Like the street hawker, he understands how to pull in the crowd, make them an offer that they can't resist and walk away with their cash in his pocket.

How else can we explain his ability to mock the afflicted and minority groups and get away with it? He does that because his core audience are not engaged on those subjects - at least not in the same way that the competitions' public is.

Obama was revered for his oratory and diplomacy - the very opposite of Trump you may think, and yet Donald has the right speaking skills for HIS audience. It is not the same audience that that Barack and Hillary addressed, they had lost their market share and Donald was not interested in them; and he certainly is not using the same speaking approach - he doesn't have to and won't, he is speaking to a different audience .

Trump is bringing business to the Whitehouse like no other President before because he sees America as a business, a huge company with a massive workforce that requires work. He needed to get them motivated to believe that capitalism is best handled by people who understand markets and not politicians who understand how to handle diplomacy and keep everyone happy. Trump is not interested in keeping anyone happy other than his workers in USA Plc.

Politics and politicians have let millions of us down for centuries in applying all sorts of economic strategies. Many of us bemoan politicians for "not living in the real world" for not having had any "real work experience" and for being career politicians. No one can lay that claim at Trump's feet - like it or not, President Trump is right on at least one front.